Having just had the pleasure of meeting the man himself when I was his DJ support at some industry shindig in Central London the other week. I’d decided to backtrack and revisit this, his last album for Touch. Those first few albums for R&S Records were deceptively dubbed ‘ambient’, but I’d found them to be anything but. More propulsive statements in isolated techno.

In short ‘Dropsonde’ is pretty amazing. The opening snow drift of ‘Dissolving Clouds’ lends an abstract, disengaged feel that’s reminiscent of earlier work before the shuffling jazz drums of ‘Birds Fly By Flapping Their Wings’ sets the tone for the rest of the album. And despite his meteorological association with winter, I found this to be a warm, accessible, beautifully presented and inviting piece of contemporary electronic music. [Sheikh Ahmed]

Sonomu (Sweden):

Dropsonde, the latest album by the most interesting and constantly evolving ambient artist of them all, announces itself with a three-note chime, not unlike the station identification used by the NBC television network. Biosphere then builds an entire track out of it by bending, stretching, delaying and quietly embroidering in between this trio of notes. It´s that simple, and yet not at all.

In this newest work, Biosphere returns to rhythmic music, but not of the sort that characterized his early, classic, techno-influenced albums, like Microgravity and Patashnik. Instead, he borrows an idea already broached by a handful of other artists – loaning rhythm tracks from “classic jazz” – and makes it his own by encompassing it in his signature otherwordly sound.

Appropriately enough, a “dropsonde” is a device which relays organic information to a computer. And is this not what Biosphere has been doing throughout his career, somehow relaying his impressions of the world of around us electronically?

All other considerations aside, the litmus test is how good the music is to listen to, and it is just gorgeous. “Warmed by the Drift” is one of the most assured and sensual pieces Biosphere has ever committed to record. Surrounding it are ten other pieces over a generous running time of seventy minutes, each one a small masterpiece, closing with the weightless drift of the elongated “People Are Friends”.

A highlight of the year in music as well as a highlight in the œvre of Biosphere. And as always, housed in a typically beautifully crafted Touch digipak. [Stephen Fruitman]

Grooves (USA):

On his eighth album, Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen has done something not many would have expected of this ambient soundscape guru: He’s reinvented his sound. Over the course of a career now spanning well over a decade, Biosphere has dependably crafted minimalist, drifting music that pulses serenely on the edges of consciousness, incorporating rhythmic loops almost subliminally into his fog-like constructions. On albums like his epic Substrata and its sublime follow-up Shenzhou, which incorporated hazy orchestral samples into the mix, this formula worked beautifully. But on his last album, Autour de la Lune, Jenssen’s longtime formula abandoned him, and his subtle music drifted across the very fine line into boredom and emptiness.

Perhaps realizing this, Biosphere has made Dropsonde a very different effort indeed. In terms of surface sounds, this new disc is not an entirely drastic departure – there’s still the same attention to melodic loops and subtly layered sounds – but Jenssen has also incorporated more traditional rhythms that shake off the sleepy stupor of Autour. On “Birds Fly by Flapping Their Wings”, this new sound is shown off early as jazzy drums and cymbal splashes drive steadily atop the more familiar ethereal shimmer. “In Triple Time” explores similar ground, but even more exuberantly, with rapid drumming and upbeat melodic loops bubbling away in the background.

Elsewhere, things are more familiar, and not every track is dominated by Jenssen’s nods to rhythm. “From a Solid to a Liquid” is a lovely, haunting piece that builds a warm, slowly percolating melody atop the crackling hiss of field recordings, and it’s very much in the spirit of Substrata. On “Fall In Fall Out”, Jenssen strikes a middle ground between old and new for the album’s most compelling track. Crackling vinyl noises and digital glitches glide across a dim bed of chopped-up melodic fragments, with drums blending in more than they do on other tracks.

Dropsonde is an interesting, if not entirely successful, new direction for Biosphere. While Jenssen never really approaches the grandeur or elegance of his best work, it’s nevertheless encouraging to see this talented artist rethinking his approach. [Ed Howard]

All Music Guide (USA):

Geir Jenssen has moved toward something new on Dropsonde — finally on CD after having been issued on LP some months previously. The CD version contains more music, about 25 minutes more. It’s the sound and arrangement of this one that grabs the listener’s attention quietly and gently, but nonetheless insistently. First, the definition that provides a telltale hint of the album’s sound: a “dropsonde” is a radiosonde, dropped by parachute from an aircraft, to obtain soundings of the atmosphere below. The principle applies here in spades. The opening moments of Dropsonde’s second track, “Birds Fly by Flapping Their Wings,” are familiar to all of Jenssen’s ambient music: a gray sonic wash of random elements that could be weather, water, etc., float in from the margins. A synth plays a quiet drone underneath for a few moments. About 40 seconds in, a drum loop that could be from Tony Williams on a Miles Davis record slips in. It’s constant, it never moves, but it shimmers just right for the two-chord keyboard sequence to hover above while the other sounds and keyboards subtly move in ghostly fashion through the middle and underneath. The rhythm is hypnotic, but the piece is far from static — it just slowly draws you in. There is emotion in it; it feels good; it feels meditative but alive. The piece gradually strips away everything but the sounds the listener heard coming in. The Miles reference isn’t a mistake; in a number of tracks here, Jenssen touches upon the jazz musician’s colors, modes, tensions, and edgelessness. It’s the Miles of the second quintet and the Miles of In a Silent Way, where mode falls away and the smaller, repetitive vamp leads the way in. Check “Triple Time,” “Fall in, Fall Out” (with its shimmering, authoritative military-style loop), and “Arafura,” which is perhaps the finest articulation of Jenssen’s method; it’s spare and beautiful yet lush, with slowly unfolding mystery. Other tracks here, such as “Daphnis 26,” offer a more forbidding ambient tone before the loops kick in and send the listener to an edge that never quite materializes. “Altostratus” and the opener, “Dissolving Clouds,” are far more minimal, almost random in their computer tones and tunnels. The blissed-out “Sherbrooke” is a minor masterpiece, taking the ambient form into new directions with its utilization of sonic loops that become rhythmic statements under the radar. The album closes with the whispering quietude of “People Are Friendly,” with keyboards swelling gently in hushed tones as voices appear and disappear through the mix for the entire ten and a half minutes before the album itself, like the track, disappears into silence, echoing memorably but indescribably in the mind of the listener. Jenssen only records when he has something new to say; he’s said it here.

Urb (USA):

XLR8R (USA):

It was inevitable that Norwegian ambient minimalist Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) would explore the microfibers of jazz. After a dozen years of pioneering quiet, cold-filtered electronic music that invoked his arctic surroundings, Jenssen now applies his techniques to ECM-style sounds (think Keith Jarrett, Ketil Bjørnstad, etc.). Unlike his jazz-noodling countrymen, Jenssen sacrifies none of his contemplative ambient climates on ‘dropsonde’, his fifth release for England’s austere [! – ed.] Touch label. Whereas Jenssen’s attempt to “bliss out” classical music samples and loops on ’02’s ‘Shenzhou’ proved lacklustre, the jazz snippets on “In Triple Time” and “Fall In, Fall Out” add tension to a recording that will leave you mesmerized for repeated listenings. [Tomas Palermo]

Almost Cool (USA):

Geir Jenssen has been creating ambient music under the name Biosphere for over fifteen years now. He’s released nearly twenty albums worth of material in that time, both on his own and in collaborations with everyone from the Higher Intelligence Agency (on the great Polar Frequencies) to Deathprod. In that time, his work has plumbed such a signature sound that he’s been coined as having originated the “Arctic Sound.” Over the course of the past couple years (especially on his releases for the Touch label), his work has reached a very high level of maturation and development. Maturation isn’t probably quite the right word for someone who has been creating music for so long, but his past several releases have burst forth with such singular, refined (yet unique) visions that although the variety of his early work like Substrata is made to sound like sketches in places. His Shenzou is an all-enveloping soup of strings and murky nocturnal pulses while his most recent effort Autour De La Lune pushed off into deep space with icy tones and much less of a focus on melody. In that same way, Dropsonde finds Jenssen moving in another singular direction for the course of an entire album, and the result is again highly refined and enjoyable.

Jan Jelinek and other artists have been dipping their toes into jazz music for some time now, but you haven’t heard anyone melt the pieces of the genre down to their base elements and reconstruct them in the way that Jenssen has here. After the short opening track of “Dissolving Clouds,” the album moves forth with warm resonated melodies and shuffling snares in “Birds Fly By Flapping Their Wings.” “In Triple Time” again finds some jazz percussion loops shuffling while filtered and bent horns moan like whale calls in a bay.

I mentioned Jelinek above, and in places on Dropsonde, there’s definitely a resemblance. “Fall In Fall Out” is all stuttering upright bass loops and hissy vinyl static while a martial snare keeps time. Most of the other times, though, the album reaches for those deep, dark places that Biosphere seems to know how to massage best. “Warmed By The Drift” calls to mind the title as layer upon layer of dense washes cover your ear like blowing snow while “Daphnis 26” chugs along with deep, rumbling beats and multiple layers of stuttering loops. As with his other excursions into different styles, Jenssen still maintains an almost signature sound on most of the tracks, and because of that very reason, you will definitely enjoy this album if you like his other work. I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for this type of all-enveloping ambient music, and Jenssen seems to know just which buttons of mine to push.

rating: 7.75

LA Alternative (USA):

Back from his lonesome astral roaming on 2004’s Autour de la Lune, Norway’s Biosphere (AKA Geir Jenssen) seems still affected by that oxygen-deprived, zero gravity excursion. Although a version of it was already released on vinyl late last year, Dropsonde is now available on CD with new artwork (blurry sunspots in place of an ethereal cloud cover), six new songs and one track missing (the LP’s closing “In the Shape of a Flute”). The sine wave purism of Autour all spent, Jenssen throws in some uncharacteristically skittering breaks for the hi-speed hypnosis of “In Triple Time,” steely rhythms pulsing and recombining all over the iridescent “Arafura,” a hissy march holding the worn grooves of “Fall In, Fall Out” together and asthma-attack beats for “Daphnis 26.” But throughout Dropsonde, Jenssen remains blissed out and gone, less interested in thump and boom than texture and space; hewing to Brian Eno’s proclamation, back when the producer-performer was building an oeuvre of “ambient” long-players in the late 1970s, of an “environmental” music that is “to be experienced from the inside.” Dropsonde looks back to that analog moment of minimalist experimentation while also swimming ahead through glistening digital tides. “Sherbrooke” recalls the ecstatic fuzz and melodious glide of Loveless though played through shiny circuits instead of Marshall stacks while closer “People Are Friends” is a reminder that Jenssen was trafficking spectral tones and ghost voices long before Boards of Canada. A dizzying canvas of weightless loops, Dropsonde proves this veteran architect of twilight soundscapes remains a master of the machine-addled sublime.

Straight No Chaser (UK):

Word (UK):

Rock Sound (UK):

Future Music (UK):

Indieworkshop (USA):

There are few musicians or composers that can hypnotize me the way that Geir Jenssen does. His subtle manipulations of patterns and soundwaves will have me staring at my speakers for hours on end. Almost instantaneously my eyes glaze over and I sink deep into my couch. The rhythmic pulses wash over me and surround my head like a warm scarf. Like the cover art, I’m aimlessly lost in a wispy sky. I’m back on the hill behind my boyhood home, looking up at the clouds while I waste my summers away. And while that all sounds over dramatic and more than a tad pretentious, if you have sat and listened to any one of Jenssen’s recordings as Biosphere those words will ring true. It’s sonic therapy; music’s answer to acupuncture and meditation.

Where his last album, Autour de la Lune, was mainly an exercise in the lower registers of the sonic realm, Dropsonde is brighter and more immediately engaging listen. Instead of feeling the steady grown and emptiness of space, Jenssen has tapped into a sound almost reminiscent of 90’s drone kings Seefeel. It’s very much more looped based, with almost every song focused around one centralized “riff” as it were. But it’s not just a slow manipulation of that one loop, he incorporates different textures and sounds (non-looped) through out, giving each track a personality and a degree of interest well above most drone based music.

The songs have that certain chilled out feel, but it’s not as desolate as Autour… I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this time around Jenssen has gone poppy, but the heavy weight of his past work has somewhat been lifted. It’s an album that begs for your attention while it floats you off into the sky. Everything just floats out of you, anger-tension-worry-energy, and you are left to bob up and down with the slow ebb and flow of his sonic waves. Trance has never been so interesting and peaceful. [Jake Haselman]

Intuitive Music (Spain):

In top 20 albums of 2005

In “Dropsonde” Biosphere is pushing new directions towards the jazz colours of Miles Davis and Jon Hassell, whilst re-invigorating the pulse and projection of his signature sound: a hypnotic combination of pleasure and dread. A perfect invitation to new paths in electronic fusion music for the 21st century.

The Big Chill (UK):

Here comes another icebreaker from Geir Jenssen’s secret Tromso headquarters.
“A ‘dropsonde’ is a weather reconnaissance device designed to be dropped from an airplane or similar craft at altitude to take telemetry as it falls to the ground. It typically relays information to a computer in the host plane by radio. A parachute may slow the fall. Information collected by a typical dropsonde may include wind speed, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure”.

The notion of this small, compact and highly mobile unit of super quality technical kit listening to the environment, is oddly metaphorical for the Biosphere programme itself. Music that is as much about the world about us as it is about top end digital production layering. And as always, the fantastic quiddity of the work.

The six tracks on this album are currently only available in vinyl format; the CD will follow in November [now early 2006 – ed.]. The music represents a change from the impressionist washes of Shenzhou and Autour La Lune but it is unmistakeably the work of Biosphere. The territory is confirmed from the opening bars.

The widescreen aspect of the sound is firmly present but there is now a shuffling and insistent feel that has been absent of late and is much welcome on its return. The beat is back, as “Birds Fly By Flapping Their Wings” heralds an urgent drum pattern under a floating sky that is echoed in the snare drum matrix that tags down “Fall in, Fall Out”. .
“Altostratus” is another floater, suspended in its own animation and creating the three dimensional space in which the Biosphere sound collage defines itself best. The stand out cut, however, is the majestic “Sherbrooke” which is a rising, building anthemic humdinger capturing light and space and adding almost Copeland like brush strokes which ever so faintly suggest “Shaker Leaps”.

As in the other cuts these sprung rhythms underpin and add to the mix bringing an element of excitement to the tracks and making this a landmark record for the artist. This is a wonderful piece of work and one of the most organic sounding electronic albums to emerge so far this year. [Alan James]

Milk Factory (UK):

Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen has spent the last fifteen years redefining the boundaries of electronic-based ambient music. Although his early solo work as Bleep was largely club orientated, his first output as Biosphere, the 1993 album Microgravity gave the first signs of Jenssen’s future musical direction. Since, his work has taken many shapes, from records and installations, often involving landscapes, to live performances. Since his 1997 album Substrata, Jenssen’s records have increasingly become more introverted and distant, with last year’s Autour De La Lune, a project based around the Jules Verne book of the same name, being by far his most austere work.

With Dropsonde, Jenssen returns to more hospitable territories. Abandoning drone-like moods for richer soundscapes, Jenssen applies jazz-infused beat patterns and tones over sumptuous loops. The album opens in typical Biosphere territory, with a dense formation reminiscent of Substrata or Polar Sequences, but, just a minute in, a relentless bip-bop-flavoured beat kicks this comfortable setting in the balls and sends the composition spinning in a totally new dimension. While this combination originally appears rather linear, soon, scattered over a surprisingly clear melodic line, incredibly fine sonic details materialise, each one impacting on the listener’s perception by adding some relief to the landscape.

Jenssen applies similar principles to four of the five remaining tracks, yet, he finds a different way to cast his sounds and shape the mood of a piece with each new track. Dropsonde is a far cry from the impressionist touches of Shenzou or the barren backdrops of Autour De La Lune. Here, Jenssen embraces rich sonic formations, engages groove and applies lavish brushes and textures all the way through. The only composition to deviate slightly from this template is the wonderfully smooth Altostratus. Here, Jenssen revives for a moment the mood of Patashnik by sending out electronic pulses above a sombre cloud of electronic soundwaves.

It is no coincidence that this particular album is originally being released on vinyl. While Jenssen’s various efforts of the last few years suited the clinical sound of CDs, Dropsonde gains in depth and texture with additional crackles and statics, while Jenssen’s sound palette also contributes to giving this album a raw organic feel. Adding to the mood is the album length itself. Clocking at just under forty minutes, Dropsonde is Biosphere’s briefest record, yet still allows for vast sonic spaces to develop fully while remaining entirely consistent, making it Jenssen’s most accomplished record to date. [4.8/5]

Biosphere “Warmed By The Drift” – And this, friends, is probably the best track of the bunch. No beats, no rhythm, no melody to speak of, just transcendent aural beauty. It’s the kind of music that constructs soothing images in the mind’s eye–which for me were of a deceptively desolate desert landscape at dawn, as viewed from the perspective of a driver who’s been making an all-night trek. She’s been witness to the gradual brightening of the sky, watching the shadows appear and slowly start to edge across the distant bluffs on the horizon. It’s been a long and lonely stretch, with nothing on the radio but preachers and country music to keep her company, but the miles have ticked down to double digits and home (and breakfast) isn’t far away now. The stillness and peace of the surrounding landscape as it warms to another day is awesome, overwhelming, stunningly beautiful.

Moebius Rex blog:

Biosphere “Warmed By The Drift” – And this, friends, is probably the best track of the bunch. No beats, no rhythm, no melody to speak of, just transcendent aural beauty. It’s the kind of music that constructs soothing images in the mind’s eye – which for me were of a deceptively desolate desert landscape at dawn, as viewed from the perspective of a driver who’s been making an all-night trek. She’s been witness to the gradual brightening of the sky, watching the shadows appear and slowly start to edge across the distant bluffs on the horizon. It’s been a long and lonely stretch, with nothing on the radio but preachers and country music to keep her company, but the miles have ticked down to double digits and home (and breakfast) isn’t far away now. The stillness and peace of the surrounding landscape as it warms to another day is awesome, overwhelming, stunningly beautiful.
It’s funny that that should pop into my head, because Biosphere is usually associated with the frosty fjords and snowbound forests of Norway, where Geir Jennsson (the man behind the music) makes his home. But my mind works from its own experience: I’ve not logged much time in the permafrosted parts of the world, but I did spend formative years of my life in southwestern Arizona, and, later, made several drives through Nevada and down I-5 in California. You make do with what you have. The lovely thing about Dropsonde, Biosphere’s forthcoming CD release, is that it works with you to construct your own vision of peace and tranquility. Very highly recommended, especially for those of you dealing with stressful times (ah, but who isn’t?).

Before starting his musical career, Japanese noise pioneer KK Null studied the jarring dance theatre known as Butoh. Characterized by their white-painted bodies and grotesque beauty, Butoh dancers are said to concentrate intently on an internal image and move in response to this inner vision. Audiences are not expected to know what the dancer is seeing, but to construct their own story for the dance.

Null’s recent collaboration with Chris Watson (Cabaret Voltaire) and z’ev has a similar Rorschach effect. Like Toshiya Tsunoda’s latest, Number One juxtaposes the natural and synthetic. But while Tsunoda practices minimalism, this trio creates thick soundscapes of crickets, thunder, elephants and manmade sounds that hum, grind and resonate. This is sound at its most visual, and every pair of ears will see something different. [Mack Hagoo]

It might be a bad idea to release two different versions of the same album on two different formats (and only a few months apart) for most artists, but something tells me that fans of Biosphere won’t care. Geir Jenssen, the Norwegian father of ambient techno, has the pull and the following to do just that. While the LP for Dropsonde came out late last year, it boasted a mere six tracks of his masterful sonic waves. And while it’s a great LP, you can never have enough of these hypnotic loops at your disposal. So adding five more tracks, the CD version has enough drone to put you into a comfortable two week coma.

The five extra tracks go a long way to creating a totally different feel for this alternative version to the LP. But even with the new songs and longer format, it’s hard for me to come up with a new angle to take on this release. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great and might even be of a more complete listen than the LP version. But I feel like I’ve said all that I need to say when I tackled the LP.

But maybe you missed my review earlier this year, so lets recap. Dropsonde is the aural equivalent to floating in a sensory deprivation tank. The music is so bleak and minimal that when it starts you could easily miss that it was playing at all. But slowly it seeps into you, it quietly creeps under your skin. The slightly altering loops will dig deep into your vital organs and start tugging ever so softly at your mind. It happens so subtly that you don’t even realize it, but you’ve become completely engulfed in Jenssen’s world. Your eyes will softly roll into the back of your head and astral projection won’t seem like a far-fetched idea.

With almost twice the amount of tracks, and over twice the length, the CD version of Dropsonde might even be a better listening experience than the LP. Down tempo DJ’s have probably bought up all the LP versions, so I’m guessing the CD version might be the only one you will be able to find these days. But if you are into chilling out and putting on something to zone out to you won’t regret picking this up for one minute. [Jake Haselman]

Tinymixtapes (USA):

Though it is being touted as an effort to incorporate elements of modal jazz with the signature Biosphere “arctic sound,” Dropsonde, put simply, is merely another strong release from Norway’s Geir Jenssen and is very much in the same vein as previous releases, albeit with jazzier, slightly noirish overtones. Much of the album, which was recently issued on CD after having been previously released on vinyl, has a vaguely jazz-tinged flavor, but beneath its downtempo trappings, Dropsonde shows Biosphere remaining close to its ambient techno roots—perhaps even making something of a return to them after the starkness and minimalist austerity of recent Biosphere efforts.
The first half of the album alternates between beatless, Eno-esque ambience and evocative, jazzier soundscapes featuring beats that reveal their vinyl source material. Much of Dropsonde sounds influenced, to some degree, by the Radiohead b-sides of the Amnesiac era. Like the Radiohead tracks, Dropsonde shows Jenssen not so much attempting to create an album of modal jazz per se, but rather utilizing jazz elements to infuse these tracks with a moody, smoky atmosphere. Dropsonde, like previous Biosphere releases, is certainly characteristic of the artist’s signature downbeat and trancelike sound, but the addition of sampled live instrumentation and gentle, brushed drum loops adds a warm, autumnal hue to these pieces. Like his peers Thomas Köner and Jan Jelinek, Jenssen makes liberal use of needle noise and vinyl static to add a pleasant warmth to the proceedings that helps to offset their frigid, wintry chill.

Biosphere, like Brian Eno, has been a pioneer in the genre of electronic ambient music. Additionally, like Eno, Jenssen is a master of using music of a frequently quiet and unobtrusive nature to generate tension and an often palpable mood. Aside from his releases under the Biosphere moniker, Jenssen is an experienced soundtrack composer, having composed the haunting, icy score to the original 1997 Norwegian film Insomnia. Dropsonde, though perhaps closest, structurally, to the 2000 Biosphere release Cirque, is the artist’s most melodic release to date. Conspicuously moving away from the glacial drones and minimalist dub that was featured so prominently on previous Biosphere releases, Dropsonde shows Jenssen putting his compositional skills to better use, as well as utilizing a richer sonic palette than that to which we are accustomed. The album is an accessible and beautifully-produced recording that shows what Geir Jenssen is capable of when he allows his Biosphere project to thaw out just a little.

D-Side (France):

The Sunday Times (UK):

The List (UK):

Foxydigitalis (USA):

Biosphere is already a legend in the genre of ambient techno/electronica and his numerous albums are considered to be genre-defining by many. Still, his music has never sounded overly exciting to me and that hasn´t changed with the release of “Dropsonde.” After its initial LP-only release, it is now available on CD in the typical impeccable Touch design with photos by Jon Wozencroft and some extra tracks.

Because Geir Jenssen a.k.a. Bioshphere lives in the far north of Norway, “arctic” is a standard synonym to describe his music. In comparison to some of his previous work, “Dropsonde” is much warmer in feel though. The introductory “Dissolving Clouds” marks a hopeful beginning of the disc with its shimmering sine wave sounds. What follows is a variety of two different types of tracks. Several tunes combine sampled jazz beats with dancing hi-hats with the standard digital arsenal of looped organs, strings, etc. These tracks are not unpleasant at all, but they have been heard in one or the other variation many times over the last seven or eight years. Also, tracks like “Fall In Fall Out” or “Birds Fly By Flapping Their Wings” show such little variation that they get boring quickly. In a way they sound like sketches streched to fit the standard “five minutes plus” format of ambient techno. Only on “Daphnis 26”, Biosphere shows his real capabilites in the above described first category of tunes on this disc. The drum samples are more tribal and the track is developing in an energetic way.

Apart from “Daphnis 26”, beatless songs are Jenssen´s real strength. The slowly morphing “From a Solid to a Liquid” is a beautiful and soothing piece of dreamy ambience. So are “Warmed By the Drift” and “People Are Friends”, which feature the more somber aura, Biosphere is known for. Biosphere fans – and I know there a lot of them out there – will be happy to hear that the CD version is half an hour longer than the LP version. For me though, 70 minutes are just too long when there are only four or five tracks that are interesting enough to disrupt me from my daily ongoings. [Stephan Bauer]

At work above the Artic Circle for around 15 years, Biosphere’s last few records have shown Norwegian Geir Jenssen using subtle conceptual tweaks to build upon the landmark gossamer style he came close to perfecting with 1997’s Substrata. While Shenzou’s Debussy reworkings and Autour de la Lune’s mining of a French radio play based on Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune provided welcome abstractions, there’s a certain unwanted heavy-hand that settles over Dropsonde’s approach of modal jazz structures and appended percussion. Whereas Jenssen had previously allowed his instrumental loops, samples and gauzy textures to traffic in hints and innuendos, here they become overstated and bluntly obvious. Melody is the focus, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, this emphasis forces the loss of some of the brilliant sheen that made his other records so intoxicating.

Originally released as a six-song LP, the CD version of Dropsonde doubles the length of the vinyl and still manages to omit one track from the original release. The major problem here comes from the added percussion. While not affixed to every track, Jenssen’s sampled drum loops sound as if they were stapled to his pieces as a mere afterthought, and generally his rhythmic counterpoints lack variation throughout the course of his tracks. Previously cadences were implied, but here they come front and center. This isn’t really bad, per se, and when the titular signature kicks on “In Triple Time,” the effect is actually quite sublime. But there wasn’t much of a need to muddy up the birdsong recordings on “Birds Fly by Flapping Their Wings” with generic drum patterns when his typical exegesis would have done just fine. Likewise, the pronounced blurps of “Altostratus” chafe a bit too much, while the harder loop of “Sherbrooke” sounds like an unwelcome return to the click + cut aesthetic.

There are patches of brilliance throughout Dropsonde, however, even with the added skins. “Daphnis 26” approaches Jan Jelinek-worthy loops by holding the percussive patterns at bay – they threaten to pulse hard, but Jenssen always manages to pull back on the reins. For those seeking a return to his earlier highlights, “From a Solid to a Liquid” capably soundtracks transference to melodic whisps, while “Warmed by the Drift” glacially stretches string tones to an effect that almost sounds like bowed ice blocks.

Ultimately, it would be horribly unfair to fault Geir Jenssen for attempting to reach outside of his soundworld in a manner such as this. After all, a lack of variation has undone quite a few musicians who haven’t been going for nearly as long. However, much of the Biosphere catalogue earned repeated spins because multiple listens were necessary to fully grasp the intricacies of Jenssen’s work. Here, the emphasis on modal structures reveals too much too quickly, and the loss of the subtle makes the album just a bit forgettable. Still, it shows that Geir has plenty of tricks up his sleeve even after a decade and a half of work. Whatever comes next will undoubtedly still be worth a listen. [Michael Crumsho]

SATURDAY 8 APRIL
FEATURED ALBUM – DROPSONDE
BIOSPHERE is Norwegian composer and performer Geir Jenssen. You may
recognise his work without knowing it, so frequently does it crop up on
TV trailers and idents. As with all of the BIOSPHERE albums, the music
draws you in and makes you want to listen and feel. Jenssen’s work acts
on a very emotional level, one that encourages you to drift away into a
haze of images and scenes brought to you by the music.

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